How to move from Google Latitude to Google+ Location

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By the middle of August, Google Latitude will be gone with the expectation that users will go to Google+ Location instead.

Google has worked hard to make sure that you want to use their social network. They have accomplished this be moving a huge swath of their features into Google+ through a series of slow, yet deliberate, moves. Their latest update to Blogger allows you to use Google+ as a comment platform, while their review system for restaurants and businesses in Google Maps now requires a G+ account. The “+You” at the top of every Google service implores you to either try out or come back to the young social network.

There’s nothing wrong with Google+, mind you, but many of these decisions can easily be seen as forcing users to opt into a service they don’t want in order to get features they previously had access to elsewhere. Google Latitude is the latest of those features, and here’s what you need to do in order to use the service after August 9.

Google+ now has an option labeled Location in the mobile app. Tapping this tab will take you to a service that looks very similar to Latitude, with the faces of your friends and family members strewn across a large map. You can zoom in and pinpoint their last reported location, but you can’t ping them for a check in like you could in Latitude. As long as your friend is reporting their location, however, you will see them move on the map.

If you’re interested in sharing your location with others, you have to go into Google+ Location and pick who you want to share your location with. You can share publicly, so anyone with a Google+ account can see your location, or you can choose to limit your sharing to specific circles and people. If you’re an active Google+ user who uses the circle organization system, this process is really quick. If you have everyone dumped into one circle, you basically have to either put the people you want to share with in a circle and choose that circle or select each individual and share with them.

There doesn’t appear to be a way to access this location sharing from the web for now, so you’ll only have access to locations on your phone or tablet. Google has rolled the other Latitude features, like the location history tracking, into the Google Setting app on Android phones. There’s currently no iOS equivalent, but that will likely be changed in short order.